Did it affect your business as much as the first lockdown?
Were you as well prepared this time around?
What can you do to ensure that, should another lockdown come into effect, you can continue to work effectively; transitioning seamlessly from the office to working from home?
There are a few things that you can put into place, through the use of simple and cost-effective technology, to ensure that you can quickly implement the necessary measures for another lockdown without it impacting your business significantly.
Here’s how:
Hosted Desktop:
You can implement a hosted desktop for each user within your business - meaning that wherever you are and whatever device you are using to access your login, your desktop will look exactly the same, with everything in the same place across all the devices that you could use.
You could have the latest version of Microsoft Office, your e-mail, your spreadsheets and your Microsoft Teams discussions, available and accessible on every device you use – fully backed up to the cloud. And what’s more? You can have all of that for less than the cost of a cup of coffee a day for each user!
E-mail:
Email is one of the most important tools for any business and you don’t want to risk missing that very important email, just because you’re out of the office or onsite with another customer, do you?
Email is like a jigsaw; there are many pieces of information within an email that can be scattered around and it’s not until you, or your software, put all of the pieces together in the same place and in the right order, that it begins to make sense.
It’s great being able to access your email on your phone! But can you see your sent items, contacts and calendar too? All in one place?
By using Microsoft’s Online Exchange (Office 365) you can both have your cake, and eat it!
Online File Access:
What about your need to access your business’s files and programs that it has stored on the server in the office? There’s little point in working from home if you or your employees can’t access the important documents they need to do their job!
At Pearce IT we can provide you with our Cloud service - ensuring that not only are your PC’s and Servers backed up as often as you require them to be, but that you also have access to them via a web browser. By making them available to you whenever you need access to them via a web browser, it means that all of the files, documents and folders stored on your PC’s and servers are able to be viewed and edited on almost any device, at any given time.
And, with our Briefcase option, you can also have all of your files on all of your devices synchronised locally on PC’s and Macs; giving you offline access to essential documentation you need whilst out and about.
VOIP:
Voice Over Internet Protocol.
Sometimes, even though we converse with lots of people via the internet and on our phones using e-mail, text and chat functions, it is nice to hear another human being on the end of the line, have a discussion with them and get business done.
VOIP telephony technology has come a long way in just a few years and, with the latest technology, we can make and receive calls just by taking our phone with us, wherever we go, and ensuring it has access to an active internet connection.
With a VOIP system installed you can call your clients using your business’s telephone number, and using the free call allowance that you’ve already paid for, as if you’d never left the office!
There are a number of packages available for phones that include unlimited calls and even cheap overseas calls.
Remote Access:
To some, using cloud-based systems can be a daunting prospect – it is a fairly recent concept to be taken up by mainstream businesses, after all – and, while it is as safe a place as any to store your companies documents and data, you may just need, or prefer, access to a bespoke application or service that runs only on your desktop in the office.
At Pearce IT we can create a VPN (Virtual Private Network) by joining your remote device (i.e. your laptop, tablet or home PC) to your corporate network, enabling you to connect to your office resources, safely and securely, without the use of cloud technology.
These are just a few ways that Pearce IT can help your business run as usual. Give us a ring today to find out what your options are.